Mini Disc To G5; Di To G5 Options

[mpnow]

Two related questions;

1) I have sketches of rough songs I recorded with the aid of a tiny little stereo microphone on a sony minidisc player. I would like to put them onto the hard drive of my G5. How do I do this?

2) I have been trying to start recording these sketches straight onto the mac (into Garageband) using exactly the same little microphone that I used to record onto the sony mini disc, but without any success. I do not understand why not.

I have checked that
(a) the mike still works by using it on the mini disk player again five minutes ago;
(b) in my 'system preferences' I have made sure that the 'input' is on 'audio line-in', that the volume control is up as high as it will go (though it seems to refuse to stay there and become the default volume setting);
© that the tiny little jack of the mike is plugged into the audio input jack on the back of the G5; and
(d) in Garageband, the new track is a 'real instrument' (voice).

Do not see what else I can do (I have not yet tried plugging the mike into the headphones socket on the front as I do not want to damage anything). Anyone any suggestions that will do the trick with the tools I have before me?

[ullanta]

That's Optical/Line in... a jack with two functions.

A mixing desk doesn't generally get audio into a computer readable format... for that you need some kind of computer interface (which connects USB, FireWire, or PCI Card, usually). The Mac has the line input, but the sound quality is generally much less than what you would get with even cheap external equipment. The Mbox (and many other devices) provides high quality mic and instrument preamps and A/D conversion, along with some monitoring and insert functionality; it also provides digital input.

ProTools LE is not at all a crippled version... it has a limited track count (32 + MIDI), but otherwise provides all the functionality of a TDM system, and has the benefit of being completely compatible, so you can easily bring a drive over to someone who has a TDM rig to take advantage of their expensive plug-ins and such... The main difference between TDM and LE is that TDM allows you to take advantage of very expensive DSP hardware wherer LE does everything natively. Suffice it to say, ProTools LE is used in all facets of professional production, and has even pulled many people (especially mobile people) away from TDM.

The MBox has really nice mic preamps compared to similar devices (and even compared to the Digi002 systems), and ProTools on a well-maintained system is extremely stable and reliable. The Mbox handles only two simultaneous inputs and outputs. If you want to record more tracks at once, or play back more, there are currently many firewire devices which will handle that, from PreSonus, Tascam, M-Audio, as well as the Digi002 and 002R ProTools systems. I can't vouch for their software stability. Or, you can get a mixer and an Mbox-type device and rercord stereo mixdowns. Or get one of the new computer-connected mixers (Mackie Onyx with firewire I/O for quality and $$, or Alesis USB Mixers for low price, etc.).

Right now, there's a bewildering array of options. My personal experience has been that ProTools LE systems (MBox and Digi002) have the most stable software (I've done many OS/computer/ProTools version changes without problem), have the most commonly used (at the professional level) software and the high-level of support that it entails, and very nice, reliable (except for the pesky 002 power harness) hardware that's all well worth the price premium....